More than 100 years ago, Hungarian immigrant Joe Hussli brought the seeds for a medium-hot pepper from his homeland and planted them in his new hometown of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. The pepper was popular enough to be named after the town where it arrived, but like many other heirloom vegetable varieties, it fell out of favor after hybrids (plants created by cross-pollinating two closely related species, usually to select for certain characteristics) were introduced in the 1950s, and the pepper was all but forgotten—even in Beaver Dam—until recently.
When Greene moved to Chicago, her plan was to find farmers who needed help marketing products they were creating from what they grew. Immediately, she hit a snag: not many existed. There were a few farmers with their own line of products, like Tomato Mountain in Brooklyn, Wisconsin, and River Valley Ranch & Kitchens in Burlington, Wisconsin, but those companies already had their business models set up and didn’t need her help.
After Greene finally got her hands on some Beaver Dam peppers, she began experimenting with recipes in her kitchen while trying to find a manufacturing facility. That turned out to be even more of a challenge than locating the peppers; the scale at which she wanted to make her products ruled out a shared kitchen space, but most midscale facilities aren’t set up to deal with fresh ingredients, Greene says. Most places she looked at that made tomato products, for example, were working with 55-gallon drums of preprocessed tomatoes, not fresh ones. It took her the better part of a year to locate two facilities that were willing to work with her.
And Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, has embraced its pepper since being reintroduced to it, hosting its first annual Beaver Dam Pepper Festival in October 2014. The event also served as an informal family reunion for Joe Hussli’s descendants, many of whom had moved away from Beaver Dam and never met each other until they returned for the festival last year, Greene says.
Still, the vast majority of the 5,000 pounds of Beaver Dam peppers grown this summer went to Greene. Next summer, she’s hoping that 35 restaurants will use the pepper; chefs, she says, are the best ambassadors for them. “Consumers go to restaurants in order to be inspired, get something exciting that they’re not used to,” she says. At a grocery store or farmers’ market, on the other hand, most people won’t buy varieties they’re not familiar with.
